Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “I’ve no idea, either,” Will said. He bit his lip as something occurred to him. “You know, I suppose I could even be fifteen by now. I might have had a birthday.” Then he chucked the paper down. “But none of this is going to help Elliott. Come on.”

  They continued along the gangway and through several bulkhead doors until Martha came to a cabin. She seemed reluctant to enter it. Chester looked at her questioningly. “Too many bad memories,” she whispered.

  Will had already poked his head inside the cabin. “It’s a mess in there.”

  Martha nodded. “It was like that when I found it,” she said.

  “But what about the people — the crew? Was there any sign of them when Nathaniel first came here?” Chester asked.

  “None. And from the looks of it, they left in a hurry. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to crawl away someplace and get some sleep,” she said, staggering wearily back along the gangway.

  Will and Chester set about searching the cabin, in which there was an examination table and a light on an adjustable stand. There were also several medical posters of the human body on the walls. Many metal-framed chairs were heaped in a corner as if they’d just been thrown there, and a good deal of broken glass and medical instruments were strewn across the floor. But what immediately caught the boys’ attention was that one whole side of the cabin was taken up by tall cabinets. They quickly began to open these, finding numerous drawers inside them, all lined with foam inserts. Will clucked as he found only empty impressions in the foam of the drawers he was searching, but Chester was having more luck, coming across numerous bottles of pills and liquids.

  The boys worked together, taking everything out and placing it on the examination table. In the process, Chester remarked on the dark patches all over the melamine surface of the table. “What do you think this is?” he asked, gingerly touching one of them.

  “Could be blood,” Will said, frowning at the thought.

  Chester stared at it uneasily for several seconds. “So what did happen to the crew?”

  “Who knows? Maybe they were all wiped out by those flying things I saw,” Will replied. “Why else would they leave so much kit behind?” He sniffed, then sniffed again. “Do you smell that? There’s something sort of sour in here.”

  “Hope it’s not me,” Chester said earnestly, lifting up an elbow to sample his armpit.

  Will smiled. “No, I don’t mean us. It’s a chemical smell. Like chloroform or something.”

  Chester rubbed his forehead, his expression one of concern. “I was thinking … what if the very thing we need — the antibiotics — have already been used up by the crew, or even taken by Martha when she came here before? She did say she lost a load of stuff on the way back to Nathaniel.” He thought for a second. “And you do know that antibiotics go bad if they get too warm, don’t you? When I had some pills for an ear infection, my mum kept them in the fridge.”

  Will was undeterred. “Look, there’s got to be something here … anything … that can help Elliott. We can’t have come all this way for nothing.”

  With all the medicines they could find spread out on the examination table, Chester began the arduous process of trying to decipher the labels, as Will held the lantern. They became increasingly despondent; either the words were way beyond Chester’s limited knowledge of the Russian language or, even if they were in English, they didn’t mean anything to either of the boys.

  Fretting to himself, Chester was checking through all the bottles a second time as Will scoured every inch of the cabin to see if they had missed anything. As he began to pull the chairs from the corner, he spotted something.

  “Wahay!” he exclaimed, quickly hoisting it out and putting it on the table.

  It was an orange plastic case. He undid the catches and raised the lid. There were quite a few medicines piled inside, which he and Chester immediately began to scrutinize.

  “Amoxicillin!” Chester exclaimed, holding up a bottle of pills. “I recognize this! The doctor gave it to me when I got a cut on my knee and it got all puffed out with pus.”

  “Amoxicillin? Are you sure?” Will asked him.

  “One hundred percent. And the Use By date probably isn’t that long ago. I bet it’s still safe to take,” Chester said. He suddenly grabbed Will’s arm. “Wait, what are we doing?! Rebecca! We left Elliott with Rebecca!”

  Will tried to calm him down. “Cool it — we’re going back there right now. I’m sure everything’s fine.”

  “I don’t care what you think! She’s alone with Elliott! And I left my flipping rifle there, too!” Chester cried, launching himself through the doorway. Out in the gangway, he was moving so fast that he walloped his forehead against an oil lantern hanging from one of the overhead pipes, but still he didn’t slow down.

  With Will close behind him, they burst onto the submarine’s bridge. Chester went straight to his rifle and snatched it up. Elliott was still lying on the stretcher where he had left her, but her bindings and blanket had been removed.

  “What have you done to her?” Chester demanded furiously, pointing at Elliott.

  Rebecca backed away in alarm at Chester’s outburst. The fact that he had his rifle in his hands made him all the more threatening.

  Kneeling beside Elliott, Chester put his ear to her face. Then he took hold of her wrist. “She’s still got a pulse,” he told Will.

  “I cleaned her up. That’s all. I found a tank of water up front. And a bottle of iodine to sterilize it,” Rebecca explained. “You shouldn’t drink it, but it’s OK for washing.”

  “I think Elliott’s all right,” Chester said to Will, as if he hadn’t heard a word Rebecca had been saying.

  “Chester,” Will said, “she’s wearing fresh clothes. Her face has been washed. Look at her!”

  “I haven’t done anything to hurt her,” Rebecca insisted, almost in tears. “I was just trying to help.”

  Chester caught sight of a small fire burning in the corner of the bridge. “Then what the heck is that? What’s your game?”

  “I’m heating up some broth for Elliott,” Rebecca replied quietly. “Thought you might like some, too.”

  Chester caught his breath, looking a little sheepish as he realized that Rebecca hadn’t been up to anything sinister. “Right … good,” he said, adding a gruff “thanks” as he rose to his feet.

  “My pleasure,” Rebecca said, then noticed the bottle in Chester’s hand. “You found something!” She turned to Will. “Can I see it?” she asked him eagerly.

  “No, you can’t,” Chester replied automatically.

  “Oh, come on. Let her,” Will said. “I mean, what harm can it do?”

  Chester reluctantly held the bottle out to Rebecca, who took it and studied the label. “Amoxicillin … Yes, it’s an excellent general antibiotic. These are two hundred and fifty milligram pills, so give her a larger dose to begin with … say, three or even four a day. That should do the trick if the fever’s caused by a bacterial infection, but of course they won’t make any difference if it’s viral.”

  “How do you know all that?” Chester asked in astonishment.

  Shaking his head, Will gave a dry laugh. “If you’re going to kill a few hundred million Topsoilers, I suppose you might want to know a bit about the medicines they use, don’t you think, Chester?”

  “Yeah, silly question,” his friend conceded.

  17

  ELLIOTT RESPONDED immediately to the antibiotics, and it was quite something when she opened her eyes three days later and was able to hold a conversation with the boys. They’d put her in what had to be the captain’s cabin, judging by the slightly wider bunk, the oak desk and chair, and the framed photographs of submarines and battleships that adorned the walls.

  Although she was still very groggy, the boys propped her up with rolled blankets, and it was a minor miracle to watch her as she drank some water unaided. Their spirits buoyed by her recovery, Will and Chester began to tell her everything that had happe
ned since the moment they’d fallen down the Pore, but it was rather a lot for her to absorb in her weakened state. Her attention seemed to wander as she just gazed around the cabin, so they decided she’d had enough excitement for the time being and should be left to rest.

  A day later she was awake and Chester was sitting with her when Rebecca flitted past the doorway on her way down the gangway. “Who was that?” Elliott demanded.

  “The Rebecca twin,” Chester said. “Don’t you remember we told you she turned up at —?”

  “She’s a Styx!” Elliott shrieked. “No! No, not here! Don’t let her in here with us!”

  Will heard the shouting from the bridge and came running in. By the time he arrived, Elliott was hyperventilating and completely beside herself. Chester was holding her, trying to calm her down.

  “What happened?” Will asked. “Why’s she like this?”

  “She saw Rebecca and just went loopy. She doesn’t seem to remember anything we told her yesterday,” Chester said, as Elliott simply sagged in his arms, falling back into deep slumber.

  Rebecca appeared at the door.

  “Haven’t you done enough already?” Chester snapped at her.

  “This is to be expected,” Rebecca declared. “Because her temperature was high for so long, it’s like her brain has been in a slow cooker…. It’s only natural that she’s acting a bit weird.”

  “So there’s nothing to be worried about?” Will shot back at her.

  “No, I wouldn’t say so, although we don’t know yet whether there’s any lasting damage from the fever. But I checked her pupils and the dilation response is normal, and her glands are down.”

  “You did?” Will asked.

  Rebecca nodded. “And as far as I could tell there’s no residual inflammation of any of her major organs. We need to keep her on a steady dose of antibiotics and just let her settle down over the next week.”

  “You sound just like a flipping doctor,” Chester said, but Will could tell he was grateful that Rebecca seemed to know what she was talking about.

  “We can’t stay another week,” Martha said, stepping out from behind Rebecca. “There’s the minor matter of food and water. I can just about keep our water supply topped up from the spring outside, but we need more food.”

  This came as no real surprise. Except for Elliott, the rest of them were already on reduced rations. Martha was doing her best to make their stocks last, and they hadn’t found anything on the submarine, other than some sucking candies stuffed into the toes of a pair of sneakers in one of the lockers.

  And because the Brights presented such a danger, Martha wouldn’t let any of them put as much as a foot outside the submarine, not for any reason. Every so often she asked Will or Chester to man the hatch while she went off to the nearby spring to fill the canteens with fresh water, protecting herself from the Brights with smoldering sprigs of Aniseed Fire. And for an hour every day she’d prop the hatch open to allow some fresh air to circulate into the submarine, but she was always there guarding it with her crossbow. At all other times she insisted it be kept shut, with the wheel turned so that it was locked down tight.

  No one had said anything, looking at each other for a decision until Martha spoke again. “There’s always the cat.”

  “We can’t let him go outside to hunt for us — won’t the Brights get him?” Will asked immediately.

  Chester inclined his head a little as he spoke. “Will, I don’t think that’s what she means.”

  “The only way we can get through another week is if we eat the cat,” Martha confirmed.

  “Eat Bartleby?” Will choked, although he still wasn’t sure if she really meant it. “Absolutely not! No chance!”

  “Then we have no alternative but to go back to the Wolf Caves … or the shack,” Martha said.

  Will rubbed his chin as he considered the situation. “Well … we can carry Elliott on the stretcher like we did on the way here. That wouldn’t be a problem. Once we’re in the Wolf Caves, we can decide what to do next. Happy with that, Chester?”

  “Sure,” Chester agreed. “Just let’s not hang around here so long that we’re eating soggy cardboard to stay alive. If we’re going to go, let’s do it soon.”

  They resolved to set out for the caves in twenty-four hours.

  Leaving Chester to watch Elliott, Will went off to check the kit in the rucksacks in readiness for the journey. Once he’d finished, he wandered aimlessly around the submarine, eventually heading to the rearmost and by far the largest compartment in the vessel. It was occupied by the submarine’s twin propulsion units, huge chunks of engine in polished steel casings. It wasn’t that easy to get around in this compartment because most of the metal grilles composing the gangways had been removed. Obviously it was where Martha’s son had obtained the metal sheeting he’d taken back to the shack.

  Immediately preceding the engines were two sealed areas which, from the elaborate locking systems, resembled some kind of strong rooms. Will discovered that their doors required special keys to open them. However, he had no intention of attempting this because of the radioactivity warning signs plastered all around them.

  As he made his way back to the other end of the submarine, he passed Martha, who was sound asleep, a hand on the crossbow beside her on the mattress.

  Will had just passed Elliott’s cabin when he heard a noise and turned to see Rebecca following quietly behind him.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, a little surprised that she was there, and wondering what she wanted.

  “Fine,” she answered sweetly.

  With Rebecca still in tow, Will reached the door that led to the bow section of the submarine. He looked through the thick glass porthole at the mass of tangled metal inside. It must have borne the brunt of the impact when the submarine first crashed down the void.

  “Bet there are torpedoes in there,” Rebecca said casually, standing on tiptoe to see over his shoulder. “Probably with nuclear warheads.”

  “Really,” Will replied, wiping the glass with his sleeve to get a better view. “Just the sort of thing your people would love to get their mitts on,” he added as an afterthought.

  She laughed, but her eyes were cold, as if Will had offended her. “No, not our style,” she said crisply as she lounged against the sloping sidewall. “We want to mend the planet, not turn it into a wasteland where only rats and cockroaches can live. But you Topsoilers seem to be bent on doing just that. You don’t care that you’re polluting and ruining it, bit by bit, day by day. Not as long as you have your three square meals, your TV, and your nice warm beds.” She was speaking with the spiteful assurance that he knew from the Rebecca of old, with the hardness that he so detested, and it riled him.

  “Don’t blame me for what’s going on,” he objected. “If it was up to me, I’d do something to stop all the pollution and global warming.”

  “Oh yeah? How? You’re just as much to blame as any one of those other seven billion people crawling over the crust like greedy dung beetles,” she said, with a glance upward. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve tried to make the world a ‘better’ place for yourselves…. You’ve tried to control everything that shouldn’t be controlled. And now that it’s all gone horribly wrong, you’re forced to try to control it even more. But you can’t, and you won’t. If you try to bend nature to suit yourself, nature’s going to bend you back. You and all the rest of the Topsoilers are fast approaching the end of the road … just as the Book of Catastrophes foretold.”

  Will didn’t much care for the way she was lecturing him, and was only just managing to keep his temper. He couldn’t believe the transformation that had come over the girl, as if she was letting her true colors show through. Then, just as abruptly, her whole demeanor changed, and she smiled. Uncrossing her arms, she waved something in front of him.

  “I thought you might be interested in these. I found them tucked down the side of a bunk,” she said pleasantly. She offered him a handful of pho
tographs, all the size of holiday snapshots.

  A little disarmed by the change in Rebecca, he took the photographs and began to look through them. There were ten in all, black-and-white and spotted with patches of mold or perhaps oil. The images were a little fuzzy and reminded him of those vintage instant photographs — Polaroids, he thought they were called — that his father had shown him of when, long before Will was born, Dr. Burrows had trekked along a section of Hadrian’s Wall.

  But these were of groups of clean-cut men in dark sweaters, some wearing military-style caps. The photographs had what looked like Russian words written on them, scratched into the glossy surfaces of the prints with a blue ballpoint pen.

  “The crew?” Will said, glancing at Rebecca.

  She nodded.

  In the first photographs, the men were on the upper deck of the submarine, the open sea behind them. They were all smiling, and their eyes were as bright as the sky above. Then, as Will continued through the pack, he came to some in which the contrast was much higher — they had clearly been taken with a flash, either in the submarine itself or underground. But still the men looked to be in good shape.

  However, the last photographs told a very different story. In these there were far fewer men, and they looked a world apart from the young sailors in the earlier pictures: their bearded faces now gaunt and grim, and their eyes haunted.

  “Poor sods. You can tell they had a rough time of it,” Will commented.

  Rebecca didn’t reply immediately. Pushing herself away from the wall as if she was about to leave, she lowered her voice. “Will … there’s something …,” she began, then seemed to hesitate.

  “What?” he asked, tearing his gaze away from the photographs.

  “Have you ever stopped to ask yourself what became of all those guys … what really happened to the crew of this sub?”

  Will shrugged. “Either they went off somewhere, or the Brights got them?”